Walter Calvo
Friday Note: When Being Wrong Feels Like Being Wronged
On the expectations that were never forecasts.
Camino Institute™ - A Transformation Practice
Someone will describe a moment to me that happened years ago, and it will still be hot.
The event is usually small in the telling. A comment made in front of other people. A decision taken without them. What does not match is the heat. It has outlasted the details, and it does not behave like the memory of having been wrong about something. It behaves like the memory of having been wronged.
That gap is worth staying with, because it tells you where the expectation was being kept.
Some expectations are forecasts. You hold one loosely, the world answers, and you adjust without ceremony. You expected the meeting to run long, it ended early, and by that afternoon you had forgotten you expected anything at all. A forecast that fails costs nothing, because being wrong was one of the things it was always for.
Other expectations were never forecasts. They are not guesses about what will happen. They are assumptions about how people are and how the world must operate, and they were in place long before anyone thought to check them.
Consider a position. Any position that carries status and importance, with resources and support at its disposal.
All of that is real, and the person occupying it is real, and they are not the same thing. The difficulty begins when the person can no longer tell the two apart.
That confusion is almost never stated out loud, and it is never held as a forecast. It is held as an assumption that becomes a belief. I am this, and what arrives for the position arrives for me.
For a long while nothing contradicts it, because the position is arranging for it not to be contradicted. Deference shows up on time. Requests are accommodated. The ordinary courtesies people extend to a role get received as a verdict on the person.
More information reaches the person in the position than reaches anyone around them, and almost none of it is about them. Nobody is hiding anything. What arrives is an accurate report on the position, read as a report on the person. So the basic regard one person owes another quietly stops being extended, since it no longer seems necessary. Manners go first, since they were the part directed at the person rather than the role.
Anyone carrying on this way is carrying on at their own risk. Sooner or later they meet someone who has weighed the cost of standing up for themselves and decided it is a cost they will accept.
I have watched what happens in that moment. It does not look like disagreement. It looks nearer to injury.
There is a way to tell the two kinds of expectations apart, and it works on you as readily as on anyone else. Do not ask whether the expectation held. Ask how it failed.
Forecasts fail politely. You were wrong, you take the correction, and the whole thing is finished in about a second.
"The other kind fails as a violation. The response is not was I wrong about that? It is nearer to how dare that happen? There is heat in it that ordinary error does not produce, and the heat is the tell. Nobody is outraged by a forecast."
That points at where each one is kept. A forecast sits in the part of us that takes in evidence, which is why evidence moves it. The other kind sits in the part that judges evidence. It is not waiting to learn whether it was right. It is the standard by which rightness is being measured. This is why bringing someone more evidence so rarely changes anything. You are handing material to the judge and asking the judge to rule on the judge.
This runs in the pleasant direction too, which matters, because it means the test is available on ordinary days rather than only bad ones. When something goes better than you assumed it would, that lift is an expectation failing as well.
So the question worth carrying is not whether you were right. It is what you were holding. A forecast can be wrong and cost you nothing. The other kind cannot be wrong at all, only violated, and it will go on collecting evidence for its own case until it is named as a stance rather than a fact.
Where did an expectation fail you recently, and what did the way it failed tell you about how you were holding it?
The photograph above has not changed. You have. What is it saying now?
Walter Calvo, LCSW, DBA, Founder and Clinical Director, Camino Institute™.